[overnight5349]

Why should EEs also be software engineers? These are two distinct specializations.

No sane person would expect a programmer to just design a lithium battery charge circuit that goes in your user's pocket, that'd be reckless and dangerous. I likewise would never expect a programmer to break out an oscilloscope to debug a clock glitch, or characterize a power supply, or debug protocol communication one bit at a time. I wouldn't ask a programmer to do FCC pre-validation, or to even know what that means.

Why then do you want to rely on an EE to produce critical software?

As an EE, I know my limits and how to separate concerns. I keep my bad C++ restricted to firmware and I simply do not write code further up the stack. We have programmers for that. Where the app needs to talk to the device, I'll write an example implementation, document it, and pass it off to the programmer in charge. It's their job to write good code, my job is to keep the product from catching fire.

If you want good code, hire a programmer. If you want pretty firmware, hire a programmer to work with your EEs. If you expect an EE to write code, you get EE code because their specialization is in electronics.

Unless you really want an EE who is also a software engineer, but then you're paying someone very highly skilled to do two jobs at once.

Electronics and software are two different jobs requiring two differently specialized people. It just looks like they overlap.

[bee_rider]

I think it is the result of how these things tend to be taught. At least in my school, all the EE’s and all the computer engineering students had the same first couple programming classes.

Lots of EE’s need to do some programming, and lots of people getting EE degrees end up in programming careers, so it would be a disservice not to teach them any programming at all. In particular, an engineer should be taught enough programming to put together a matlab or Numpy program, right?

Meanwhile, some of their classmates will go on to program microcontrollers as their job.

Writing programs and a product, and writing programs to help design a product, are two basically different types of jobs that happen to use similar tools, so it isn’t that surprising that people mix them up.

[TheCapn]

This is a discussion that is much larger than what's available in a comment section like this. But I agree with you wholeheartedly.

I think part of the thing is Software Engineers haven't been a thing for as long in the industry. I'm the only Software Engineer I've met doing controls. My supervisor has a CS degree and an Electrical Technician diploma, but never another SE.

Second is I think up until recently, the work done by Control Systems has been what's capable of an EE or ME so having a SE hasn't been necessary. I've been with my company for 10 years now, and in that time I've watched the evolution of what my clients are seeking in terms of requirements to their systems.

I primarily work in Agriculture or Food Production. 10 years ago my projects were assembling plants and getting their motors to start, with the required protections then some rudimentary automation to align paths and ensure flow.

Today? I'm building traceability systems to report on exactly which truck load was the origin of contamination for a railcar shipped months later. Or integrating production data to ERP systems. Adding MES capabilities to track downtimes and optimize production usage. Generating tools to do root cause analysis on events... It's a different world and the skills of a Software Engineer haven't really been a super important role for quite a while.

I think the mindset is shifting, but it is slow.